Production skills Core 6K approach confusion. Help!

I have finished the Core 6k by Nukemarine a year and half ago in the recognition format only where a kanjified word is shown and I have to mention the English meaning and read it in Japanese out load correctly. I have deleted the deck and never used anki since then. Well that really worked for me in terms of understanding most of the written and spoken Japanese.

Now I want to work on my production skills in which I did not gave much attention. I will be using this deck again and I seem to be confused with something. That would be if I should do a production(English word>Japanese word) or a cloze deletion. I'm pretty confident my recognition skills so understanding the sentence would be easy. Also I've had my share of reading lots of Japanese materials so context grammar should not be a problem.

I've heard people around here talking in favor of either the other and that makes me pretty tied with both of them.

I just want to be able to pull to a word I need quickly when talking and typing in Japanese. I've also started talking with Japanese people online too, but I think anki can help me in a more systematic way......

What approach should I take? production? [b]cloze deletion? Or another kind of deck? A combination?

Decks that simply ask you to produce a Japanese word from a given English word are almost completely useless. They can be okay as a complete beginner, but once you're much beyond the first steps you'll know 'too much' Japanese for that to work. That is, given a certain English word, you'll often know multiple Japanese words that could be translations of the English word.

One solution is to make notes about the part of speech, give a very precise definition instead of just a 1-word gloss, etc, but that's pretty burdensome for card creation and not terribly effective. Cloze deleted sentences can work in many cases, but there will still be cases where more than one word you know would be a valid answer. You can either add hints or just delete cards that have this problem.

Ultimately, it's such a pain to maintain sensible cards for vocabulary production that very few people actually do that. It's just more effective to invest the time into writing on lang-8 or doing shadowing practice or whatever non-anki study methods you might have for production.

Here's my recommendation based on recent Memrise experience over the last year.

For vocabulary, have a card that gives English prompt, Heisig Keyword of kanji in the prompt, and any additional notes. Make it so you have to type in the answer using a Japanese IME. DO NOT include info for the example sentences.

For example sentence, have the card play the Japanese audio for the sentence. Include what the vocabulary word is for that sentence. Your job is merely to understand what the sentence is wanting to say. The answer side shows the Japanese sentence and translation. Consider this less a test and more a reinforcement training of your listening ability.

This should replicate what I've been doing for Optimized Core 2k/6k vocabulary on Memrise. On there, I have students type in vocabulary word to get the answer for words. For sentences, they listen to Japanese audio and select the correct Japanese sentence from choice of 8. Please note though that I've expanded the English prompt for vocabulary. I'll try to make these edits available in updated spreadsheets for people to use in their Anki decks.

I agree with Chris. I think that really doing production on Anki cards just gets annoying and isn't worth it. That's not to say that I don't say hmm maybe I should give it a go and try it from time to time. I do. But after a month or less I just get annoyed and I kind of question the value and go back to recognition. Find some Japanese forums or something to post on instead or make some facebook friends, skype friends, go to Japan and talk to friendly Japanese girls. And keep reading / watching TV / listening to the radio or whatever.

Keep in mind that a lot of kanji recognition type cards can be pretty similar to a production card. 貫く for example. （つらぬく）your brain is doing a lot of work reading that word thanks to the awful kanji writing system.

(2017-01-11, 1:59 am)Nukemarine Wrote: Here's my recommendation based on recent Memrise experience over the last year.

For vocabulary, have a card that gives English prompt, Heisig Keyword of kanji in the prompt, and any additional notes. Make it so you have to type in the answer using a Japanese IME. DO NOT include info for the example sentences.

For example sentence, have the card play the Japanese audio for the sentence. Include what the vocabulary word is for that sentence. Your job is merely to understand what the sentence is wanting to say. The answer side shows the Japanese sentence and translation. Consider this less a test and more a reinforcement training of your listening ability.

Nukemarine, so your approach would be more leaning to a production type. I don't understand why should I put the Rtk keyword together with the English word? Would not the keyword give out hints, also I don't remember much of the keywords, as in my brain they have been overwritten with Japanese meanings.

The same thing can be said about close deletion though as they give hints too in the form of a sentence. I'm starting to also think a close deletion may give more hints and the blank could be also filled with other Japanese words than the intended one.

If I were to do a purely English word to Japanese word I can try to mention all the Japanese meanings I can think of. But without any context it would be weird.....

I agree strongly with typing though. Is there a way to include typing in Anki Android. I mostly use my phone to do my reviews.

For example sentences I have reading materials with has native audio, Japanese text and English translations all the time. I think using them instead of anki is funner and I get to read what I like too.

One solution is to make notes about the part of speech, give a very precise definition instead of just a 1-word gloss, etc, but that's pretty burdensome for card creation and not terribly effective. Cloze deleted sentences can work in many cases, but there will still be cases where more than one word you know would be a valid answer. You can either add hints or just delete cards that have this problem.

Ultimately, it's such a pain to maintain sensible cards for vocabulary production that very few people actually do that. It's just more effective to invest the time into writing on lang-8 or doing shadowing practice or whatever non-anki study methods you might have for production.

Hints? In my anki journeys I've always relied on pre-made cards. Maybe a small example can make it clearer to me.

Well I've been having some chatting language exchanges. Since chatting allows you to edit and correct,I can sound pretty natural. Real conversation is the beast though, you can't make corrections as often. Also I tend to stray away from SOV word formats when talking, since the Japanese word order is pretty flexible. I usually just say what thing come to my mind.

Thx for the reply

(2017-01-11, 7:36 am)kraemder Wrote: I agree with Chris. I think that really doing production on Anki cards just gets annoying and isn't worth it. That's not to say that I don't say hmm maybe I should give it a go and try it from time to time. I do. But after a month or less I just get annoyed and I kind of question the value and go back to recognition. Find some Japanese forums or something to post on instead or make some facebook friends, skype friends, go to Japan and talk to friendly Japanese girls. And keep reading / watching TV / listening to the radio or whatever.

Keep in mind that a lot of kanji recognition type cards can be pretty similar to a production card. 貫く for example. （つらぬく）your brain is doing a lot of work reading that word thanks to the awful kanji writing system.

Yes, anki has sometimes annoyed me. Well that's what had prompt me to delete my deck a year half ago. I feel my life getting sucked through it. But by selling my soul to anki, I can enjoy reading Japanese without consulting a dictionary often. I don't use anki to retain it anymore too.

Now I need to rely on Anki again for my production skills. I used it for my rtk also, I can't write much but it helped a lot when acquiring vocab words on recognition skills.

Anki is great in terms in does allow you to remember words from various situations efficiently. Chatting in Japanese makes me only use the limited Japanes my production vocab database(in my brain)

(2017-01-11, 1:06 am)SomeCallMeChris Wrote: Decks that simply ask you to produce a Japanese word from a given English word are almost completely useless. They can be okay as a complete beginner, but once you're much beyond the first steps you'll know 'too much' Japanese for that to work. That is, given a certain English word, you'll often know multiple Japanese words that could be translations of the English word.

I think this depends.

I might argue that if you know at least one way to say something, then you shouldn't bother wasting time learning synonyms or other ways of saying the same thing. Time spent learning synonyms could be much better spent learning words that allow you to express completely new ideas.

For recognition, it is obviously beneficial to know everything that you can, because you do not control what is coming your way. But when creating output, you are very much in control, so having one way of saying something can be sufficient for most people, at least until reaching much higher levels of the language.

With that said though, my preferred way of doing production is to do cloze deletion with english prompt. I do not use full sentences, as this teaches far too specific context. Rather, I include as few words as necessary. My cards generally look something like this:

I support clozed deletion from my personal experience. it has done wonders for my retention of korean and japanese. There's so many ways you could use the clozed deletion and hopefully you can find what works for you. you can blank any part of the card you want and you'll probably soon notice how some certain parts are more conducive to remembering. ALSO you can experiment with how much to blank out. sometimes blanking out a single syllable can make the card very useful. I personally love my mcd format of putting the word or sentence or part a sentence,the definition in english or japanese ( i chosoe one or sometimes use both but usually i choose) in the front (blank out a part of the word or the sentence or both) and the answer to clozed deletion in the back.

The Core deck isn't necessarily the greatest when it comes to closed deletion. I've found I need the English on side one as well as the sentence with the closed delete. My Core deck came with a picture too for most cards which sticking on side one can be helpful. And then, due to all the synonyms in the deck, I started putting hints like not this word or not that word.. I also tried putting the first hiragana letter as a hint on the card to help me rule out synonyms and jog my memory.

I was doing the 10k (random new card for variety, not in deck order) and I haven't gotten through the whole thing so there were words I hadn't seen before I was learning through closed delete. But the deck will tell you (if you add the field) what number the word is in the deck. I stuck that on side one too as a hint and this was also a bit helpful... and I found that cards with vocab in the core 6k were much easier for me production wise than cards over the 6k. Because I really already knew the vocabulary I think. So maybe your idea could work well since you also said you got through the 6k already.

But I still think you're better off speaking/writing than using production cards. At least I think I am so I'm going that route.

(2017-01-11, 1:59 am)Nukemarine Wrote: Here's my recommendation based on recent Memrise experience over the last year.

For vocabulary, have a card that gives English prompt, Heisig Keyword of kanji in the prompt, and any additional notes. Make it so you have to type in the answer using a Japanese IME. DO NOT include info for the example sentences.

For example sentence, have the card play the Japanese audio for the sentence. Include what the vocabulary word is for that sentence. Your job is merely to understand what the sentence is wanting to say. The answer side shows the Japanese sentence and translation. Consider this less a test and more a reinforcement training of your listening ability.

Nukemarine, so your approach would be more leaning to a production type. I don't understand why should I put the Rtk keyword together with the English word? Would not the keyword give out hints, also I don't remember much of the keywords, as in my brain they have been overwritten with Japanese meanings.

The same thing can be said about close deletion though as they give hints too in the form of a sentence. I'm starting to also think a close deletion may give more hints and the blank could be also filled with other Japanese words than the intended one.

If I were to do a purely English word to Japanese word I can try to mention all the Japanese meanings I can think of. But without any context it would be weird.....

I agree strongly with typing though. Is there a way to include typing in Anki Android. I mostly use my phone to do my reviews.

For example sentences I have reading materials with has native audio, Japanese text and English translations all the time. I think using them instead of anki is funner and I get to read what I like too.

Thx again for the reply!

As mentioned, as your vocabulary grows, you find that there are multiple correct answers to the same question. With having Heisig keywords, that provides an English hint much like the English prompt itself is technically a hint. However, the keywords give you definite "This not that". You still need to know how to pronounce the word in order to type it into the IME which ultimately is the goal. While not as important for Anki, it was essential for Memrise as it demands a 100% perfect answer. I think it works for Anki as well since it helps remove ambiguity which can annoy people.

If you're using Anki Android, you don't have to type. I just use that for Memrise as opposed to selecting among 8 choices. Just mark it wrong if you got the pronunciation of the word wrong. Thing is, it's really easy to fudge and think "Oh, it's ひこうき and not ひこき, but close enough so that's fine." so be careful.